At today’s ACC DIY seminar Jon Taplin compellingly outlined how DIY ethics and technologies are part of the driving force behind California’s bold move away from the broken federal system and toward a decentralized state-based system.

In “The Bear Flag Revolution; California’s Experiment in the New Federalism” he writes:

I believe that this coming age of reform will bring about a positive transformation of American society as we grapple with the meaning of “the end of scarcity”.The old guard of the defense and extraction Industrialists who have done so well with two of their own running the country (Bush-Oil; Cheney-Defense contracts) will work extremely hard to hold on to power and they have a commanding old style media megaphone run by interested parties to put out their story (the war is going well, the economy is great, etc.). But the Industrialist model of Big Media is failing in the age of the Internet and so the voices of digital democracy will be heard. The task is to redefine the notion of national security and purpose around two basic principles. The first is that in the networked society, U.S. influence will flow from our global economic and cultural power as opposed to our military power. The second is that as the sources of leadership innovation and change in this new world come from decentralized, networked, bottom-up forces of the Digitalists, the American political structure will have to adapt to a devolutionary notion of power. States and Cities will become the important sources of leadership and the Federal Government will start shrinking.

You can read the whole paper here and view the slides from his talk here.

Every year, John Brockman asks a question of a widespread community of thinkers and publishes it on Edge.org. I reproduce here my answer to this year’s question — “What are you optimistic about?” — in its entirety:

The tools for cultural production and distribution are in the pockets of 14 year olds. This does not guarantee that they will do the hard work of democratic self-governance: the tools that enable the free circulation of information and communication of opinion are necessary but not sufficient for the formation of public opinion. Ask yourself this question: Which kind of population seems more likely to become actively engaged in civic affairs — a population of passive consumers, sitting slackjawed in their darkened rooms, soaking in mass-manufactured culture that is broadcast by a few to an audience of many, or a world of creators who might be misinformed or ill-intentioned, but in any case are actively engaged in producing as well as consuming cultural products? Recent polls indicate that a majority of today’s youth — the “digital natives” for whom laptops and wireless Internet connections are part of the environment, like electricity and running water — have created as well as consumed online content. I think this bodes well for the possibility that they will take the repair of the world into their own hands, instead of turning away from civic issues, or turning to nihilistic destruction.

The eager adoption of web publishing, digital video production and online video distribution, social networking services, instant messaging, multiplayer role-playing games, online communities, virtual worlds, and other Internet-based media by millions of young people around the world demonstrates the strength of their desire — unprompted by adults — to learn digital production and communication skills. Whatever else might be said of teenage bloggers, dorm-room video producers, or the millions who maintain pages on social network services like MySpace and Facebook, it cannot be said that they are passive media consumers. They seek, adopt, appropriate, and invent ways to participate in cultural production. While moral panics concentrate the attention of oldsters on lurid fantasies of sexual predation, young people are creating and mobilizing politically active publics online when circumstances arouse them to action. 25,000 Los Angeles high school students used MySpace to organize a walk-out from classes to join street demonstrations protesting proposed immigration legislation. Other young people have learned how to use the sophisticated graphic rendering engines of video games as tools for creating their own narratives; in France, disaffected youth, the ones whose riots are televised around the world, but whose voices are rarely heard, used this emerging “machinima” medium to create their own version of the events that triggered their anger (search for “The French Democracy” on video hosting sites). Not every popular YouTube video is a teenage girl in her room (or a bogus teenage girl in her room); increasingly, do-it-yourself video has been used to capture and broadcast police misconduct or express political opinions. Many of the activists who use Indymedia — ad-hoc alternative media organized around political demonstrations — are young.

My optimism about the potential of the generation of digital natives is neither technological determinism nor naive utopianism. Many-to-many communication enables but does not compel or guarantee widespread civic engagement by populations who never before had a chance to express their public voices. And while the grimmest lesson of the twentieth century is to mistrust absolutist utopians, I perceive the problem to be in the absolutism more than the utopia. Those who argued for the abolition of the age-old practice of human slavery were utopians.

Jennifer Urban and Cory Doctorow spoke in tandem at the December 14 DIY Media seminar. I will post separate entries, although their presentations were closely related.

“DRM is broken,” Urban declared, at the beginning of her talk about “Bits will never get harder to copy: the limits of copyright online.” (Apparently, according to a separate report, Bill Gates agrees) The problem, as the graphic below illustrates, is that until DRM started building legal restrictions on the use of cultural products into the hardware used to access those products, the relationship between technological capabilities, laws, and social changes was flexible enough to allow copyright laws to evolve with the times. When radio came along and enabled the broadcast of music that had previously been accessed through live performance or sheet music, the legal remedy of compulsory licensing enabled rights owners to be compensated and for a new medium for musical performance to grow. DRM, together with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which criminalizes circumvention of DRM measures, puts an end to that flexibility by instantiating in technology a social agreement that used to be mediated by courts: “DRM stops the change process” that been evolving since the establishment of copyright laws.

“Fair use,” fundamental to education, scholarship, and the arts, is broken because the rights holder, not a legal process, determines the boundaries, and “DMCA makes breaking DRM to enable fair use illegal.”

In addition to the social damage caused by cutting the legal system out of the process of determining the limits of licenses for cultural products, Urban pointed out that DRM leads to disasters like the Sony rootkit fiasco, in which hundreds of thousands of Sony CDs were distributed with DRM protections that installed malware on the computers of people who simply wanted to listen to music — compounded later by the exploitation of the malware by hackers.

Jennifer Urban is a Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center and a Clinical Associate Professor of Law at USC. She teaches Intellectual Property and classes related to Technology Law and Policy. She also is the Director of the USC Intellectual Property Clinic, where students learn intellectual property law through hands-on work with cutting-edge, real-world projects. She is a faculty member of the USC Center for Communication Law and Policy.

The LinkTV people, who really know what they are doing, have succeeded in merging DIY video, online community, the electoral process, and the public sphere. Check out Thepeoplechoose.org, where citizens contribute their own video to document, advocate, critique, argue and persuade other citizens — rather than passively sucking down the huge amounts of broadcast propaganda, they are actively making their own:

The mission of The People Choose 2006 is to “democratize” the 2006 midterm Congressional and Senate elections—to let American citizens help shape the nation’s election coverage and give them access to factual information about elections that includes the priorities of voters. The People Choose 2006 will enable anyone anywhere to upload videos and information about the campaigns in their Congressional district or state to a dynamic, map-based index open to the public. The videos may be included in programs broadcast nationwide on Link TV. The result is election information from the point of view of the citizens—not corporations, campaigns or political parties. We hope to change the way the media cover elections in the U.S. by giving citizens a role in that coverage. By building a national online community whose members can see one another’s needs and priorities, we seek to move Americans away from the politics of attack and narrow issues.

(Via deeplinks –>boingboing)

The Digital Freedom campaign is a new joint project from EFF, Public Knowledge, the Consumer Electronics Association and the Media Access Project:

Digital technology enables literally anyone and everyone to be a creator, an innovator or an artist — to produce music, to create cutting-edge videos and photos, and to share their creative work. Digital technology empowers individuals to enjoy these new works when, where, and how they want, and to participate in the artistic process. These are basic freedoms that must be protected and nurtured.

The Digital Freedom campaign is dedicated to defending the rights of students, artists, innovators, and consumers to create and make lawful use of new technologies free of unreasonable government restrictions and without fear of costly and abusive lawsuits.